For whatever reason, liberal Presidents never seem capable of recognizing that their failures stem from bad policy, not poor messaging or sinister conspiracies by others.

Tweet

Blamestorming:  n. A method of placing blame for a mistake to which no one is willing to confess.  Often occurs in the form of a meeting of colleagues at work, gathered to decide whom to blame for a screwup. 
~Oxford English Dictionary

Bill Clinton blames Colin Powell.  Jimmy Carter blames Ted Kennedy.  Barack Obama and his administration seem to blame somebody new each week. 

Is there something endemic to current and former Presidents of the Democratic species that induces this chronic tendency to scapegoat?  And why have we witnessed such an epidemic from them recently? 

This week, amid Senate debate over Harry Reid’s provision within a defense appropriations bill to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, former President Bill Clinton told CBS’s Katie Couric that the policy he initiated was all the fault of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell: 

“I was promised it would be better than it was…  So there’s been a lot of rewriting history, saying, ‘oh, Bill Clinton just gave into that.’  That’s just factually false.  I didn’t do anything until the votes were counted.  Now, when Colin Powell sold me on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ here’s what he said it would be.  Gay service members would never get in trouble for going to gay bars, marching in gay rights parades as long as they weren’t in uniform, getting gay materials, for any of the places they went or any of the things they did as long as they didn’t talk about it.  That was what they were promised.  That’s a very different ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ than we got...  But the reason I accepted it was because I thought it was better than an absolute ban, and because I was promised it would be better than it was.” 

At least Clinton, however, spared us the toxic bile that Jimmy Carter spewed a few days earlier while scapegoating the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D – Massachusetts).  In an interview with “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, Carter blamed Kennedy for blocking health care legislation over thirty years ago: 

“The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or ’79…  It was his fault.  Ted Kennedy killed the bill…  He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.” 

Beyond Carter’s usual sanctimony, that’s quite an ironic accusation coming from the man who attacked subsequent Presidents in a manner suggesting that he didn’t want to see them “have a major success” in their administrations. 

For example, Carter attacked Ronald Reagan in his diary, saying, “If I had been president for four more years, we wouldn’t have had a resurgence of racism and selfishness.”  Carter also called George W. Bush “the worst president in history,” which is like Bob Dylan calling Sam Cooke a hoarse singer.  Carter also undermined George H. W. Bush by writing a letter to the United Nations encouraging them to reject a resolution to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion and brutal occupation of Kuwait. 

And then there’s Barack Obama, who is obviously getting an early start relative to Carter and Clinton. 

Along with blaming everyone from private businesses to physicians to nameless forces treating him “like a dog,” Obama introduced the habit of attacking his predecessor by name.  The result?  Ohio voters recently told pollsters by a 50% to 42% margin that they would prefer to see Bush in the White House today than Obama.  So then Obama shifted to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R – Ohio), but that didn’t seem to get him anywhere, either. 

Now this week, the internal inspector for the Securities and Exchange Commission has labeled the SEC’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. “suspicious” because it was timed to distract attention from a report criticizing the SEC for failure to stop Ponzi schemes operated by people like Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.  In other words, Obama’s SEC is now suspected of filing a fraud lawsuit to shift blame and attention away from its own poor performance. 

For whatever reason, liberal Presidents never seem capable of recognizing that their failures stem from bad policy, not poor messaging or sinister conspiracies by others. 

Fortunately, as we will see this November, American voters aren’t so delusional.